I recently learnt though sharing reduces the available bandwidth for each user, it doesn’t happen proportionately. For example, a contention ratio of 1:4 does not mean each user gets one fourth of bandwidth even in simultaneous use.

Read somewhere BT uses a contention ratio of 1:20 while there are others who use ratios as high as 1:50. http://www.ukbroadbandfinder.com/broadband-providers/Fused-Business-Broadband. If BT uses a ratio of 1:20 that cannot be as bad as it sounds.

As far as I know there is no way for a user to know the contention ratio(s) used by operator(s). All what users can do is to benchmark the ‘Service Experience’ from their end. (I may be wrong, please correct if so)

We will learn more with each round of tests. Yesterday night I have been testing broadband speeds from Washington DC to 15 servers in different continents and the results were very interesting. Can you ever imagine that I get almost the same bandwidth from DC upto Vancouver, Rome, Kiev, Christchurch, KL, (and believe it or not) Mumbai, Lahore, Jakarta and Male? The only cities to which I could detect a bandwidth drop were Nairobi and Bangkok.(Sorry, not all cities are represented in speedtest.net. No servers in Colombo, Delhi or Dhaka. But you may now try the Dhiraagu server in Male) The results are too different when tested from the other end.

Showed the test results to two telecom regulatory experts I met today. They too are surprised. Can think of an explanation, but better not take guesses till we know the story in full.

Sirius Broadband prices: http://www.siriusbroadband.com/rate.php

We tested Xpress.

Just read the presentation… Do you happen to know how much the Sirius 256k broadband costs?